The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature
CIA’s secret program to send books to Soviet Bloc countries during the Cold War was one of the longest-running covert action operations in its history. Lasting from July 1956 to September 1991, the Book Program was responsible for delivering as many as 10 million volumes of dissident and Western literature to readers behind the Iron Curtain. The program started somewhat ineffectually, with early, stumbling efforts to distribute leaflets and letters denigrating communism and touting Western achievements by balloon and scattershot mailings as well as reliance on a mélange of fractious émigré groups for propaganda written in the West. It became more sophisticated over time, working through specialized CIA front companies and established commercial publishing houses in the United States and Europe to print certain works or, more often, to supply and distribute copies of existing books that Soviet Bloc governments did not want their citizens to read.
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